A founding member of the Surrealist movement and a participant in the French Resistance, Paul Éluard believed that poetry was a powerful force for political, sexual, and social change. Published in 1949, A Moral Lesson is Éluard's attempt to reevaluate good and evil in turbulent postwar Europe, concluding "The heart has so much space that it defies the stars / It is like an endless wave / It is like a spring that makes flesh eternal / The grandeur of life disavows death."